Gates of the Night (1946)
"Les portes de la nuit" (original title)

Paris, during the winter after its Liberation. Jean Diego meets up with his friend Raymond Lecuyer again. A tramp, pretending that he the Destiny, predicts Jean will meet the most beautiful... See full summary »

Director:

Marcel Carné

Writers:

Jacques Prévert (ballet "Le rendez-vous"), Jacques Prévert (scenario and dialogue)

Stars:

Pierre Brasseur, Serge Reggiani, Yves Montand

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Pierre Brasseur	...	Georges
Serge Reggiani	...	Guy Sénéchal
Yves Montand	...	Jean Diego
Nathalie Nattier	...	Malou
Saturnin Fabre	...	Monsieur Sénéchal
Raymond Bussières	...	Raymond Lécuyer
Jean Vilar	...	Le clochard / La fortune
Sylvia Bataille	...	Claire Lécuyer
Jane Marken	...	Mme Germaine (as Jeanne Marken)
Dany Robin	...	Étiennette
Gabrielle Fontan	...	La vieille
Christian Simon	...	Cricri Lécuyer
Jean Maxime	...	L'amoureux d'Étiennette
Fabien Loris	...	Le chanteur des rues
René Blancard	...	Le voisin de palier

Storyline

Paris, during the winter after its Liberation. Jean Diego meets up with his friend Raymond Lecuyer again. A tramp, pretending that he the Destiny, predicts Jean will meet the most beautiful girl in the world. The same evening, Jean meets Malou. He soon discovers that her brother Guy was the one that gave Raymond away to the Gestapo...

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Plot Keywords:

destiny | jealousy | salesman | collaboration | working class | 

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Genres:

Drama | Fantasy | Mystery | Romance

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Details

Country:

France

Language:

French

Release Date:

15 March 1950 (USA)

Also Known As:

Gates of the Night

Company Credits

Production Co:

Société Nouvelle Pathé Cinéma

Technical Specs

Runtime:

120 min

Sound Mix:

Mono (RCA Sound System)

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

The roles of Jean Diego and Malou were originally to be played by then-lovers Jean Gabin and Marlene Dietrich, who had recently returned to France after the end of the war. Dietrich pulled out of the project at the last minute, however, and Gabin followed her. With the rest of the cast already selected and production scheduled to begin soon, Carné and Prévert had to choose an unknown actor for the role of Jean Diego, a singer/performer who had recently had some success in the French Music Halls - Yves Montand.

User Reviews

A very sad misfire

There's more than one reason to be utterly disappointed by this movie teaming Carné & Prévert & Trauner & Kosma again so soon after Les Enfants du Paradis.

Where to begin to describe this failure to follow up with the previous year's masterpiece? The characters are all wooden and no one has a story that gets the movie started. The best in my opinion is the character played by Serge Reggiani, the worst is the one played by Nathalie Nattier whose acting is horrendous. Anyway the love story between her character and Montand's is melodramatic in the worst sense. Montand is OK though but eventually he is as much at a loss as we are, trying to get through the story. As for the other characters they are quite colorful thus they get too much exposition which proves detrimental to the building up of a core narrative.

Sad misfire... how could they go so far downhill? I suppose it's the classic spell of bad ideas piling up to give a very bad result. A character embodying Destiny? OK that's poetic but the rest of the story unfolds in a very serious background: post-Liberation Paris with patriots and traitors casually living side by side. Some aspects are poetic, others just dead serious and the love story in between is simply stuck in a no-man's-land, non-existent. Very sad to say with the benefit of hindsight that they fumbled everything as if they didn't know how to tell a story: a love story lost in a deck of vignettes of varying interest.

Well, I'd rather think of what they could have done with the Montand character investigating in the underworld to find his fiancée or maybe escaping his fate, in line with Gabin's character in Quai des brumes. Or if they had made a dark comedy like Drôle de drame with people reuniting after the war, trying to know what each other did under German rule in order to find an upright (and innocent) new family leader to eventually hide their consciences (and ill-acquired fortunes) behind him.